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Donna Noble (Catherine Tate) is special. She was one of the very few (if only) Doctor Who companions who was a mate, just a friend and yet a really good friend. Donna started with a Christmas episode with the 10th Doctor. She was swept away from her wedding and off to an adventure with Doctor Who.

At one point Donna was the most important woman in all of creation (she saved the whole of reality from the Daleks). Then she was left back at home to go on with her life, not even knowing she had been so much more.Her adventure ended (far too soon) when the Doctor had to erase her memory of everything they had done and accomplished together. It was a tragic ending. A sad ending.

Donna Noble should have had so much better. In a later episode they brought her back as the 10th Doctor was dying – as a way of making amends (to fans I think) Donna was given a winning lottery ticket as she married someone else. To wrap things up with a tidy bow – the money for the ticket came from her Father who was deceased in the present.

Donna was gone too soon. She had so much potential and so much more storyline could have been developed – it wasn’t right to take her away and try to tie up the loose ends in a pretty bow for fans.

How could I ever go back to normal life after seeing this? I’m going to travel with that man forever. Donna Noble.

Originally posted to ‘BackWash: Where the Wild Things Are’ newsletter, February, 2, 2004.

I’m not a Buffy or Angel fanatic but I do follow the series, more or less. I like Faith, that character. I’ve thought about her even after the credits are rolling and the next show is starting. Of all the characters Faith has the least faith. She is distrustful and destructive. At least for awhile.

I’ve been thinking about faith, what that is and where it comes from and where it goes to. Kind of interesting. Having faith basically means believing in something without real proof that your belief is justified.

I once read about a woman who was charged with murder. She went through the trial and in the end the verdict was handed out as ‘Not proven’. That was something they used to do, ages ago. Not any more. But, it was interesting. For her and her life she always had that black cloud of suspicion hanging over her, not proven. Neither guilty or innocent, just some limbo.

Faith is like that too. If you take an idea to heart it’s hanging in limbo but if you have full faith in it it’s proven. If you are in doubt it’s not proven and you don’t have real faith, not blind, trusting faith anyway. There are levels of faith. I think that’s good. You shouldn’t close your mind to new theories, options and chances. Keep looking for more questions and their answers. Faith isn’t a permanent thing, written in blood or chiseled in stone. It’s subject to change.

The woman in the book had to live with people who were suspicious of her. She had trouble getting a job being allowed to go to church and being accepted by the community at all. It wasn’t fair, she wasn’t guilty after all. But, they didn’t have faith in her. They needed that final solid verdict to put her on one side or the other. you don’t get that with things you have faith in though. Pagans and Christians and all the other Faiths don’t get to see their gods or the heaven or hell they put faith in. We don’t get a preview or screenshot. It’s taken on faith.

But, it comes from within you more than something you read or are told. It has to seem realistic and practical, possible. We don’t put faith in something completely out there. Faith is too precious to just give away so easily.

Now that I’ve rambled on and on… the woman in the book did finally get her verdict of innocent. But, it came late in her life. Someone else confessed when they were dying and wanted to get all the skeletons out of their closet.

Originally posted to ‘BackWash: Where the Wild Things Are’ newsletter, May, 16, 2004.

My Dad is quite likely going to die soon, any day now. Don’t worry about sending sympathy, condolences or anything of that sort. You don’t know him. For me it’s a lot more personal.

People think the dying become almost holy. As if, while dying, they change and become a better person all of a sudden. You can’t talk badly about them, you must visit them and you should really, really hold their hand.

Well, my Dad was not a nice, happy, friendly Dad. His dying hasn’t changed that. I don’t want to hold his hand. I don’t want to go in and see him now that he is becoming a pile of meat rather than a human being. Sure, I can stick my hand inside a turkey each Thanksgiving and pull out the little bag of goodies. That doesn’t mean I want to do the same sort of ghoulish thing with my Dad. So, I am visiting him (second time will be today after work) but I am not going to touch him.

What do you believe about death? That gets tested each time someone close to us (physically or emotionally) dies. I still believe in reincarnation. I still believe the body becomes about as useful as roadkill once the person inside is gone. I still think the best body disposal method is compost in the family garden rather than taking up space in a graveyard plot. I’d much rather have my remains sucked up by worms and trees than rotting away in an expensive box.

Am I grossing you out? Am I being too blunt? Do you not want to think about death in such a practical way? Too bad. Death is part of life. There is no getting away from it. Death is always there, waiting at the end. That, I very strongly believe.

I’m not afraid of death. I’m just in no hurry to get there. I’d miss too many things. Every ordinary day, new inventions and ideas, seeing the tulips each Spring and so on.

Anyway, my Dad wants to be cremated. It looks like he will soon have his wish. I don’t think I will miss him. But I’m doing my best to be a good daughter now, in these last days. Not for him, not for myself especially, but for my brother and sisters who seem to expect something grand and dramatic and perfect. As if now that he is about to kick off forever we should honour him for the things he did right.

I think my only excuse is that I’ve been having an odd couple of weeks with odd things going on. Here is my comment to Ken’s post Remembering Liam.

Liam sounds like someone worth remembering and great to have known.

We had a family funeral this week and my Mother seems never to be far from the topic of death, dying and afterwards. This month I decided I do not believe in god. So that’s given her something new to talk about. But she’s not a firm church-goer. Just from the generation where that’s what you do and how you think. Last night Stephen Hawkings was on TV, a new show on Discover called Curiousity. It was about god and did god create the universe. Hawking, as you might guess, says no about the god issue.

It’s interesting how things all come together at the same time, isn’t it? I haven’t though about god, death, dying, and afterwards for a long time other than an interest in old and neglected graveyards/ cemeteries. But here and now it seems the issue is all over my world. Even in your Irish rover of a blog.

Your tribute to Liam was lovely to read, especially the golf part where you painted him as human after all. When I die… I will leave no one behind (no children, just a brother and sisters and maybe my Mother if I beat her to it). At the funeral this past week I listened to my cousin’s daughter talk about her. It was lovely, sentimental and a good tribute to a Mother lost. My Mother likes what I wrote as a speech about my Father when he died a few years ago. I didn’t even like him as a person.

What will anyone say about me. No one here really knows me. They think they do. I think, in the end, I’d like nothing. I’d like to be in a building that blows up or lost in a shipwreck. No body. Then, maybe, I won’t give in to the temptation to see what thy say about me. Maybe if you’ve been blown up you can’t ghost around afterwards. That’s my little misguided theory. Anyway, once you decide you don’t believe in god, it’s interesting to see what you do have left to believe in about the whole afterwards.

I still believe in reincarnation but now you have to wonder who’s behind it all, who guides the process along and makes the decisions. This is a windy and twisted comment. Should keep you busy a minute and a half, if nothing else.

I think of space when I think of that day. Kind of odd I guess. But space as an element, a thing you can almost reach out and touch, something that you could hear if you listen during a quiet time.

An empty space is mysterious and unknown. That’s likely why we fear it. Around the corner, at the other side of a dark room, the backseat of the car when you know no one is sitting there. Our hitchhiker was like that. Something in the space that you could almost feel but not actually see, smell or touch. Just something sensed enough to give a creepy feeling and start us looking into dark corners expecting to see her there.

Her, was the girl who died, of course. Alone, in the rainstorm, under a bridge, she drowned in her over turned car. I thought it was a sad way to die. Hoping to be found and yet time passing with no help. Could she see the clock on her dashboard, watch the seconds and minutes pass as she died. The water rising but not filling the car quite enough to ease the pressure so she could force open a door and escape. Or was she already gone when she hit the water? Did she never even know she was dying until she was dead?

Did she now wait on the bridge, looking at the world of the living and want to come back, to join us again or just finally get home.

My husband parked the car there, at her bridge. He’d noticed the floral offerings at the side of the road and wanted to take a look. We often made road trips to cemeteries, abandoned farms and houses. He liked to put them in a more gruesome and haunted light. He’s into horror. I’m not a horror fan, not someone who’d stay up after midnight to watch movies about murderers, violence and gore.

He remembered hearing about the accident and her death on the news. We talked about it. I was sad for her. There was nothing left of the car of course, it had all been towed away, put away and dealt with. He wanted to take a better look, maybe find some car part left over or something of hers which had been overlooked. So he picked his way down the weeds and stepped around the muddy shore searching for a souvenir.

I took some photos of her flowers. They were looking pretty weathered and shabby but I was glad her family and friends had given her a memorial, a tribute. Then we got back in the car, thinking of how welcome a hot chocolate would be. The girl was in my mind, as any tragic figure lingers awhile before becoming just a memory and passing thought.

Did he look over his shoulder first or did I? I’m not sure. More likely my husband did, he was driving and had a reason to check the rear view mirror now and then. He didn’t say anything. Just drove on down those wet dirt country roads, splashing through puddles but not laughing about the spray of water as he usually would have. I decided he was feeling a bit somber, as I was myself. When I noticed he was a bit jumpy I laughed and asked if we were being followed, maybe he wanted to play at being secret agents and spies as he sometimes liked to do on drives along quiet roads.

He didn’t answer right away. Then he asked if I could see, or did I feel, anyone in the car, in the backseat. I gave a quick look, humouring him. I was all set to say “Of course not”, but I did catch something out of the corner of my eye. Just something in that space. I turned around in my seat, pushing the seat belt off my neck, for a better look. Nothing. Of course nothing. We hadn’t brought anyone else along, not a dog, not so much as a goldfish.

“No”, I said. I didn’t laugh or make a joke about it though.

We drove farther, closer to the road into town. Each of us would sneak backward looks. I could see him look in the rear view mirror several times on a road where we were the only traffic.

He pulled the mirror down to focus on the back seat. I scrunched down to watch the back from the passenger side mirror. It began to feel really creepy in that car. Something was in that space of nothingness, something we couldn’t see.

Just behind my head I could feel eyes, keeping silent, soundless as the dead, ironically. We hardly dared to breathe ourselves. I wished my husband could find the bravery I lacked and flip on the radio. Surely something as normal and ordinary as the radio could chase away the skin crawling creepiness of whatever lurked in the backseat.

She must have been so cold, dying in that deeply chilled water. How desperate she must be now to find some warmth, something human, to not be alone and quite so dead. If you believe in ghosts surely you could see how she might want to sit in our warm backseat with the heater making the car so toasty warm. Only now I was getting chilled just thinking about heat sucking ghosts sitting just out of sight, right behind me.

Another quick flick of my eyes to the backseat. My imagination pictured her sitting there. Her eyes dark and haunted, bruised looking. Her body so cold, right through, unable to feel warmth. Dripping water. I imagined hearing the little plop, plop, plop of water as it dripped from her cold, dead self. Maybe she would shiver, not knowing that a ghost isn’t alive and wouldn’t need to shiver.

It was a long trip back to town, we didn’t speak again. How can you speak about what isn’t there.

At the coffee shop, back in the living world where the spaces are all filled with artificial light, noise from the living and the smell of bacon and eggs, it was very easy to shake off the creepy feeling and put it down to just imagination. But, the feeling came with us when we got back in the car. I feel it still.

It’s been days since we took that road trip. I’m often alone in our apartment after my husband takes the car to work. Those spaces of time which I used to do laundry, make dinner, wash dishes and vacuum are no longer just the passing of time. My space is captured by something I only feel, see out of the corner of my eye. It’s her I’m sure. I think she is sad, missing the people she knew and the things she liked to do.

Since that day at the bridge I’ve stopped looking in the backseat when I’m in the car. I avoid mirrors especially, they give me a very creepy feeling. When I brush my teeth each morning I look down, avoiding my own eyes and anything that might be in that space behind me. I never take that space for granted any more.

You see, she isn’t the only one there now. I think they followed her to our home. Someday they’ll fill all that space. Taking it all. I hardly dare to take a real breath any more. I never look into corners and I always have the lights on. Someday they will suck out all the space around me. I don’t know what will happen then, when the dead fill the space of the living. My husband thinks I’m crazy so I just don’t talk to him about it any more. But I can see he gets nervous too, sometimes after dark when the apartment is quiet and he gets that creepy sense of something else, something that hitchhiked back into the living world with us and won’t now let us go.

Working the evening shift is ok. But I can’t get to sleep when I get home. My brain perks up soon after I walk in the door. I tried to avoid coffee tonight. But now I’m just hungry and thirsty. There doesn’t seem to be a win-win situation, so far. I’m working on it. Buttermilk the other night would have been almost an ideal solution. But, so often, when I buy butter milk it is curdled even though it has plenty of time before it expires. It’s not drinkable when it all comes out in chunks. As great as it is when it’s fresh I just can’t make myself drink it when it’s curdled and lumped up.

So, I’m trying to come up with a new plan. Something that doesn’t keep me awake and yet helps so I’m not going to bed hungry and dying of thirst. Like tonight.

More snow today. Anyone want some?

I think I’m getting tired enough now. It’s a minute to 4:am so that’s a good thing. I could be up in two more hours and catch the first Barrie transit bus into town, get breakfast at McDonald’s, fall asleep at the table, get mistaken for a street person and tossed out. Then I’d have to wander the downtown streets of Barrie looking for a place to nap until 3:00 when I get to start work.

Sometimes it’s funny how the days just keep coming. No matter if you wish they’d go by faster or slower or just stop awhile and let you catch up. The days just keep on coming at their own steady pace. Whatever you finish or still have to do the day ends and the next one begins at the same time, just on a different day.

I’m trying to do the post a day thing. We’ll see how it goes. Likely there will be some cheating, personality quizzes or I’ll post a photo of something or other.

Right now my big decision of the day is whether I want to have a shower now or make coffee first. It seems coffee is winning cause I’m still sitting here, not getting closer to the room with the big water. There are times when I’m getting into the shower that I remember a science fiction movie I saw. They were an advanced civilization who needed other people cause their own people were dying off. So they brought in people with a time machine. The new people had different standards of cleanliness, showers were really new to them. They had to be forced under that waterfall and then soaped up. Hair brushing came next.

I know being clean is healthy, we’ve established that since the Medieval times when they were dying of plague. But, how far to the other side have our standards gone? People used to wash their hair once a week and it wasn’t crawling with anything. Now people have to shower daily or they become socially unacceptable. We have to shave off most of our body hair. We have to perfume and stick gunk on anything that might stink on a warm day. Are we afraid of our own skin?

For some people who seem to have taken this too far extreme I think nothing less than wearing a new man made android type body will really suit them. A suit of armour type of thing that has no real skin, no real pores and no real glands of any kind. It just stays perfect all the time. The hair never grows or gets dirty. The whole thing can be coated with some kind of no-stick stuff so that it just needs to be wiped off with a damp cloth at the end of the day.

Of course, you wouldn’t have a real body then. Sex would be kind of pointless. But you’d always smell the same and never have a hair out of place.

In your job as a tree trimmer, you’ve encountered oddities before. But nothing like this morning when you split a dying elm over on Regality Drive and found a solid stone axe embedded in its heart. It’s covered in sharply engraved Nordic runes. Translated, the runic carvings read: whosoever wields this blade shall conquer time.

Trees grow tall with huge, thick trunks along Regality Drive. I was a tree trimmer there. After I found that Viking time traveling stone axe in the trunk of a dying elm I bought myself one of those houses.

I love time travel. I decorated with real Canadiana antiques, new ones. I have the best oak dining table. I know the man who made it, went back for his funeral too.

Time travel is something everyone should do, if they could. Though that would be really dangerous and likely mess up everything. It’s really a good thing I’m the only one with the power. I fix things. I suppose I’m a bit biased. Who wouldn’t be. I don’t think I have quite a god complex yet though.

I once went very far forward. It never came to an end. That was nice to know. Earth survives, people don’t. I’m still deciding about having a family and kids of my own. It would be nice, at times. Yet, what is the point? I will always be here. Likely they’d find my axe and expect me to let them time travel too. I’m not going to share. It’s mine. I got it from the trees and I will keep it that way.

Best of all, the trees will live. I’ve made very sure of that. Eventually the human civilization had to fall anyway. Right? It will be just me and the trees and I think I will like it that way just fine.

Your playful nature brings out the happy inner-child in datesYou’re willing to take risks in love… and reap the rewardsYou’ve got a killer sense of humor that gets talking with any hottie you meet

Your negative traits:

Sometimes your sarcasm comes off as biting and abrasiveYou can be brutally honest, tactless, and truthful even when it hurtsYou’re such a free spirit that you find it hard to commit to one person

Your ideal partner:

Someone high energy who will pick up and out with you wheneverIs creative and fun – thinking of new adventures for the two of youIs bold… and not afraid to tell you “I love you” early on

Your dating style:

Unpredictable. You never know how the night is going to end up.

Your seduction style:

Daring. You’re always pushing to try something new in the bedroom.Full of imagination. You’ve always got a new fantasy you’re dying to try.Spiritually driven. Sex for you can be an other-worldly act.

Tips for the future:

Realize that while freedom is great – sometimes a stable relationship is better.It’s not all about you. Focus on your partner’s needs every once and a while.Make up your mind about your partner, and stick to it. Your fickle will ruin things otherwise.